“The Sisters”

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Summary

A young boy reflects on the impending death of his friend
Father Flynn. Knowing that after three strokes the paralyzed priest
has little time left, the boy makes a habit of walking past Father
Flynn’s house, looking for the light of the traditional two candles
placed on a coffin that would indicate his death. Each time, the
boy thinks of the word paralysis. One night at
his aunt and uncle’s house, the boy arrives at supper to find his
uncle and Old Cotter, a family friend, sitting before the fire.
Old Cotter has come to the house to share the news that Father Flynn
is dead. Knowing that everyone waits for his reaction, the boy remains
quiet.

While the aunt shuffles food to and from the table, a
conversation ensues between the uncle and Old Cotter, and the uncle
notes the high hopes Father Flynn had for the boy. He hints that
Father Flynn planned to prepare the boy for the priesthood and remarks
on the friendship between them. Old Cotter, however, thinks of Father Flynn
as a “peculiar case” and insists that young boys should play with
people their own age. While the uncle agrees with Old Cotter, the
aunt is disturbed that anyone could think critically of Father Flynn.
She asks Old Cotter to clarify his point, but Old Cotter trails off
and the conversation ends. That night, Old Cotter’s comments keep
the boy awake, and he dreams of Father Flynn smiling and confessing
something to him.

The next morning the boy visits Father Flynn’s house,
where a bouquet of flowers and a card hang from the door handle.
Instead of knocking, he walks away and reminisces about the time
he spent there. He used to bring Father Flynn snuffing tobacco from
his aunt, and Father Flynn would teach him things, such as Latin
pronunciation and the parts of the Mass. Remembering Old Cotter’s
cryptic comments, the boy then tries to recall more of his dream
from the night before, but he can remember only a Persian setting—he
cannot remember the end. That evening the boy visits the house with
his aunt, and they kneel at Father Flynn’s open coffin with one
of Father Flynn’s sisters, Nannie, to pray. Afterward, the three
retire to another room to join Eliza, Father Flynn’s other sister.
Over sherry and crackers they discuss Father Flynn’s death, his
taxing career as a priest, and the helpful services of Father O’Rourke,
another priest who anointed Father Flynn and completed all of the
necessary paperwork and death notices. All the while the boy remains
quiet. The story ends with Eliza’s recollection of Father Flynn’s
increasingly odd behavior, which started with dropping a chalice
during Mass. When one night Father O’Rourke and another priest found Father
Flynn shut in a confessional box, laughing to himself, they finally
realized he was sick.

Analysis

In “The Sisters,” and in the rest of the stories in Dubliners,
strange and puzzling events occur that remain unexplained. Father
Flynn suffers from paralyzing strokes and eventually dies, but his
deterioration, epitomized by his laughing frenzy in a confessional
box, also hints that he was mentally unstable. The reader never
learns exactly what was wrong with him. Similarly, Father Flynn
and the young narrator had a relationship that Old Cotter thinks
was unhealthy, but that the narrator paints as spiritual when he
recounts the discussions he and Father Flynn had about Church rituals.
However, the narrator also has strange dreams about Father Flynn
and admits to feeling uncomfortable around him. Joyce presents just
enough information so that the reader suspects Father Flynn is a
malevolent figure, but never enough so that the reader knows the
full story. Such a technique is hinted at in the first paragraph
of the story. The narrator thinks of the word paralysis when
looking at Father Flynn’s window and says the word sounds strange,
like the word gnomon, a term that generally refers
to instruments, like the hand on a sundial, that indicate something.
Joyce does exactly that: He points to details and suggestions, but
never completes the puzzle.

The physical presence of Father Flynn lingers throughout
the story, coloring the narrator’s experience of dealing with death
in life and showing how a death interrupts normal human activities. Father
Flynn plays a fleshly role in the story. His approaching death makes
the narrator think of the corpse, which he eventually sees. When
Father Flynn dies, the narrator continues to think of his physical
presence, particularly the lurid way in which his tongue rested on
his lip, and dreams of his face. Such bizarre physical images evoke
the awkward nature of death. Like the episodes of Father Flynn’s
odd behavior that the sisters recount, the narrator’s memories give
Father Flynn a haunting presence that is fearful and mysterious,
not beautiful and neat. In the final scene with the sisters, eating,
drinking, and talking become difficult since death frames those
activities. After viewing the corpse, the narrator declines the crackers
offered because he fears that eating them would make too much noise,
as if he might disturb Father Flynn in his coffin. Similarly, the
narrator’s aunt is unable to broach the subject of death. She asks
questions about how Father Flynn died, but her thoughts trail off.
Father Flynn may be dead, but in many ways he is still very present
among the living.

The inability of the narrator and his aunt to eat and
speak during their visit to the sisters recalls the sense of paralysis
that the narrator connects to the dying Father Flynn in the story’s
opening paragraph. This link between paralysis or inaction to both
death and religion underpins all the stories in Dubliners.
Characters face events that paralyze them from taking action or
fulfilling their desires, as though they experience a kind of death
in life. In “The Sisters,” such paralysis is connected to religion
through Father Flynn. Father Flynn’s dropping of the chalice and
his inability to grasp the same object in his coffin suggest that
the rituals of religion lead to paralysis. His sisters also attribute
his demise to the strains of clerical life. The crippling quality
of religion resurfaces in other stories like “Grace,” in which Joyce
more directly questions the role of the Church in the lives of Dubliners.

The anonymity of the boy is suggestive of the overall theme of the story, the insignificance of the individual in the larger society. The boy is unnamed because as the story demonstrates in any number of ways, he is unimportant. He lives with relatives who are not his parents which suggests a problem; it is likely the parents have made the crossing and are not yet established to bring the child over, though another possibility is that they have died as a result of the harshness of Irish life. Other suggestions of insignificance include the i... Read more→